Pandemic Timeline

Conspiracies, Depositions

Rep. Nancy Mace questions Ms. Gadde about Twitter’s censorship of top doctors

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Nancy Mace, R-SC:  Thank you, Mister Chairman.  The Twitter Files are not just about Hunter Biden’s laptop.  The Twitter Files make it apparent Twitter worked overtime to suppress accurate COVID information.  Doctor Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford who once tweeted an article he wrote about natural immunity.  Thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files, some of his tweets were tagged with the label of trends blacklist.  Apparently, the views of a Stanford doctor are disinformation to you people.

I, along with many Americans, have long-term effects from COVID.  Not only was I a long hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine.  It wasn’t the first shot, but it was the second shot that I now developed asthma, that has never gone away since I have had the second shot.  I have tremors in my left hand, and I have the occasional heart pain that no doctor can explain, and I’ve had a battery of tests.

I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s unfettered censorship spread into medical fields and affected millions of Americans by suppressing expert opinions from doctors and censoring those who disagree with the CDC.

I have great regrets about getting the shots because of these health issues that I now have, that I don’t think are ever going to go away, and I know that I’m not the only American who has those kinds of concerns.

Another example of what Twitter has done to censor folks is from Doctor Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard educated epidemiologist who once tweeted, “COVID vaccines are important for high risk people and their caretakers.  Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor children.”  But Twitter Files revealed this tweet was deemed false information because it ran contrary to the CDC.

So my first question this morning of Ms. Gadde, may I ask of you, where did you go to medical school?

Vijaya Gadde:  I did not go to medical school.

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  I’m sorry?

Vijaya Gadde:  I did not go to medical school.

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  That’s what I thought.  Why do you think you or anyone else at Twitter has the medical expertise to censor a doctor’s expert opinion?

Vijaya Gadde:  Our policies regarding COVID were designed to protect individuals.   We were seeing …

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  You guys censored Harvard educated doctors, Stanford educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world, and you silenced those voices.

My next question is, the US government …  Oh, excuse me.  I have another chart I want to show you, Ms. Gadde.  I have another tweet by someone with a following of a full 18,000 followers.  This person put a chart from the CDC on Twitter.  It’s the CDC’s own data, so it’s accurate by your standards, and you all labeled this as misleading.  You’re not a doctor, right, Miss Gadde?

Vijaya Gadde:  No, I’m not.

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  OK.  What makes you think you or anyone else at Twitter has the medical expertise to censor actual accurate CDC data?

Vijaya Gadde:  I’m not familiar with this particular situation.

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  Yeah, I’m sure you’re not.  But this is what Twitter did: they labeled this as inaccurate.  It is the government’s own data.  It’s ridiculous that we’re even having to have this conversation today.  It’s not just about the laptop.  This is about medical advice that expert doctors were trying to give Americans because social media companies like Twitter were silencing their voices.

I have another question, my last one for you, Miss Gadde.  Did the US government ever contact you or anyone at Twitter to pressure Twitter to moderate or censor certain tweets?  Yes or no?

Vijaya Gadde:  We have a program …

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  Did the government ever contact you or anyone at Twitter to censor or moderate certain tweets?  Yes or no?

Vijaya Gadde:  We received legal demands to remove content from the platform from the US government and the governments all over the world.  Those are published on a third-party website, and anyone can …

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  Thank God for Matt Taibbi.  Thank God for Elon Musk for allowing to show us and the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI, censoring real medical voices with real expertise that put real Americans’ lives in danger because they didn’t have that information.

I also want to thank one of my colleagues, Ro Khanna [D-CA], because as it turns out, censorship isn’t just an important issue to conservatives.  Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle like Ro found this censorship very concerning and even wrote to you and the folks at Twitter that he was concerned about the First Amendment being censored.  So I want to thank him for speaking up and speaking out about this issue because this should not be a partisan issue.  This should be an issue that’s an American issue.

Mister Chairman, I would like to enter into the record, I ask unanimous consent, to enter into the record a Wall Street Journal article from December 9, 2022 by Justin Hart entitled “The Twitter Blacklisting of Jay Battacharia” into the record, please.

Mister Chairman:  Without objection, so ordered.

Nancy Mace, R-SC:  Thank you, and I yield back.

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